The musings of one Andrew Langer - defender of liberty, passionate protector of individual rights, foodie.
(Note: Said Musings of Andrew Langer are his own, and the views represented herein are likewise his views, and not the views of any other people, entities, foodstuffs, etc [unless otherwise specifically and explicitly noted].)

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Some Cool New Blogs...

I was over at CEI this afternoon trying to track down Wayne Crews and John Berlau, in lieu of returning a phone call. Neither of them were there, but I got to talking to a few people, and was asked if I'd seen CEI's new blog.

Also, though I haven't met her, Richard Morrison told me about one of the new CEIers who, of course, has her own blog, Brooke Oberwetter. Funny stuff - check out the pics of Hermione, and the commentary:

Corporations have begun hiring bloggers to put out their messages and to promote products, writes Mary Jacobs. Examples: "Stonyfield Farm Inc., a dairy products maker in Londonderry, N.H., hired a corporate blogger to write company-hosted blogs on nutrition and health as well as organic farming. Microsoft Corp. plans to hire bloggers to generate excitement about an upcoming product release. Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano last week launched its "Next Big Thing" blog at www.eds.com/blogs to discuss the future of technology." And Hill & Knowlton, one of the world's largest PR firms, is encouraging its employees all to blog—after they pass a quiz. Question #1: "Why do you want to blog?" is multiple choice, with the following options for answers: a) Get promoted; b) Get noticed; c) Get fired; d) Get headhunted; e) All of the above; f) None of the above; g) I don't know.SOURCE: Dallas Morning News, August 4, 2005For more information or to comment on this story, visit:

Companies once saw them as a nuisance. Now they are trying to get the bloggers onside, realising that they can reach consumers better than any PR company ever could

David WatkinsMonday March 20, 2006The Guardian

Once dismissed as a forum for pedantic, pyjama-clad insomniacs, the blogosphere is now smashing down the barriers to information and achieving parity with the big guns of old media. At least, PR companies certainly think so. Bloggers have become a powerful conduit for stealthy, word-of-mouth marketing that can make or break the image of a company."The trick is not to try too hard to sell," says Hugh Macleod of gapingvoid.com. "You need to respect the people reading it, they're coming to you. Blogs are a great way to make things happen indirectly. It is different from creating a controlled mechanism that tries to change people's behaviour, which traditional advertising tries to do."

Microsoft stumbled on this a few years ago when one of its workers started blogging about himself. Robert Scoble, employed as a technical evangelist, has been credited with making Microsoft appear less the evil, corporate bully and more the community-minded good guy. Scoble's honest, self-deprecating scobleizer.com has turned him into a cyber celebrity, and achieved what years of expensive PR failed to do: helped to humanise Microsoft.

Transparency is essential in navigating a wilderness where, according to tracker sites such as Technorati.com, there are more than 30m blogs and 2.1 billion links in cyberspace. Anything masquerading as genuine is soon rooted out, as household cleaner manufacturer Cillit Bang discovered to its cost last year. Websites began to get messages from Barry Scott, star of the company's TV commercials, but bloggers soon discovered that Scott was a fabrication and the messages had been sent by a marketing committee. Dr Pepper made a similar mistake in seeking legitimacy through blogging with its Raging Cow energy drink, labelled, unfortunately, as a "milk-based drink with attitude".

Yet if Scoble's recent posts are anything to go by, the anti-corporate, power-to-the-little-guy sense of rebellion is becoming harder to maintain. "Blogging is authentic, and has power because of that," he writes. "But the marketers have definitely arrived and my inbox is full of people saying 'pick me, pick me'. I've realised that what got me here was listening ... I've gotten away from that because so many people think that the secret to their commercial success is to get me to link to them or talk about their products."

Yet as a workplace blogger, Scoble can count himself lucky: the Metropolitan police were banned from "expressing views and opinions damaging to the organisation." As police blogger Bow Street Runner writes: "These blogs reveal what actually goes on behind the glossy, PR-friendly corporate image put across by most forces, and threatens to actually inform the public as to what police officers do."

In the US, however, some of the corporate giants have realised that with consumers shaping brand perception online, the only way forward is to become part of the conversation. Sometimes they appear to have had no option. Take the case of Netflix, an online DVD rental store. Mike Kaltschnee - a family man who works for a photo agency - has been described as a "true customer evangelist" for setting up a site devoted to Netflix, which has forced the company's hand on a plethora of issues. Hackingnetflix.com attracts 250,000 individual readers every month, and is the second result on any Google search for Netflix. "That's pretty scary for a company," says Kaltschnee. "If there's a problem, I hear about it. When I first contacted them two years ago they really didn't know what to do with me, but they've since been very accommodating to my requests for information and accuracy and have never asked me to pull a story from the site."

Nowhere is the battle between consumers and the corporate giants more polarised than in the case of Wal-Mart, possibly the world's most demonised company. Thanks to allegations of worker exploitation and the chain's destructive effect on local shopkeepers, the retail giant already commands a sizeable chunk of the blogosphere without trying, and cyberscribes attack and defend the company with equal tenacity.

In attempting to shape the conversation, however, Wal-Mart has helped to highlight the fact that bloggers are susceptible to the very same tactics PRs have employed in mainstream media for years. Wal-Mart's communications company, Edelman, makes no secret of the fact that it sends material to bloggers, and suggests stories that may be of interest. While the majority of pro-Wal-Mart blogs give full disclosure, a handful were found to be simply regurgitating the PR copy. This prompted the New York Times to run a story arguing that Wal-Mart's strategy "raises questions about what bloggers, who pride themselves on independence, should disclose to readers".

After the story ran, message boards buzzed with sentiments that invariably included "pot," "kettle" and "black". Indeed, they did so beforehand too, with one blogger embodying the face-off between old media and new by scooping the journalist on his own story and selling ad space in anticipation of its publication.

"If you're saying bloggers shouldn't do that, you're setting a higher standard than bloggers have ever set for themselves," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee whose political blog instapundit.com attracts a large following. "Bloggers are information omnivores. They generally figure that the blogosphere as a whole is their fact-checking and editing system. And it works - the way the New York Times reporter found the stuff out was by Googling Technorati.com and noticing the similarities."

Richard Edelman, CEO of Wal-Mart's PR firm, says: "There's two sets of issues. First, should PR people be approaching bloggers as opposed to our usual friends in the media? The second question is what should bloggers do with the material we give them. I think PR firms ought to have relationships with bloggers, because so many eyeballs are now relying on blogs for information. Similarly, different aspects of the media are relying on blogs too, so if we want to serve our clients we have to do that. If we talk to bloggers, we're clear in saying we're a PR a firm and that we're working for Wal-Mart, or whoever the client is. Are we doing anything nefarious? I don't think so."

The debate over journalistic ethics rumbles on, even though most bloggers are not journalists. A study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism showed that on any given day, posts involving a blogger interviewing someone else accounted for only 1% of the blogosphere. Only 5% involved some other original work.

"You can't treat bloggers in the same way as newspapers," says Steve Rubel, whose site micropersuasion.com explores how new technologies can transform marketing, media and PR. It also helped him bag the role of senior vice-president at Edelman: the company encourages its staff to blog extensively. Look at all the events in the past five to 10 years - people don't trust businesses the way they used to. Look at the Enron and World.com scandals - people don't trust CEOs like they used to. The Edelman website has a trust barometer and for the first time we found that the most trusted sources were 'a person such as yourself or a peer'. World events have led to that and blogging has led to that. It's one chip in a wall that has already been chipped by major events in the past years."

Corporations have begun hiring bloggers to put out their messages and to promote products, writes Mary Jacobs. Examples: "Stonyfield Farm Inc., a dairy products maker in Londonderry, N.H., hired a corporate blogger to write company-hosted blogs on nutrition and health as well as organic farming. Microsoft Corp. plans to hire bloggers to generate excitement about an upcoming product release. Electronic Data Systems Corp. of Plano last week launched its "Next Big Thing" blog at www.eds.com/blogs to discuss the future of technology." And Hill & Knowlton, one of the world's largest PR firms, is encouraging its employees all to blog—after they pass a quiz. Question #1: "Why do you want to blog?" is multiple choice, with the following options for answers: a) Get promoted; b) Get noticed; c) Get fired; d) Get headhunted; e) All of the above; f) None of the above; g) I don't know.SOURCE: Dallas Morning News, August 4, 2005For more information or to comment on this story, visit:http://www.prwatch.org/node/3893

About Me

For me, it's always been about protecting rights. Probably because my parents spent so much time taking us to places where the rights of Man were fought so long and hard for.
I was going to fight the Soviet Bear, until it up and decided to collapse on its own weight one year. My career took a turn, and all of those lessons my parents taught me about environmental science, public health, and policy coalesced when I became the reader for a blind lawyer.
I spend my days dealing with regulation, which is more fun than it sounds. I'm an activist, and deeply involved in politics (at both the national and local levels).
And I'm passionate about all I do.